hideous
costumes or caricatures of costume which Horace was glad to draw, for
almost any pecuniary consideration. A series of amusingly _naive_
colored prints, illustrating the adventures of poor La Valliere with
Louis XIV., would strengthen the lesson. These were succeeded by
lithographs of an endless variety of subjects--the soldier's life in all
its phases, the "horse and its rider" in all their costumes, snatches of
romances, fables, caricatures, humorous pieces, men, beasts, and things.
In short, young Horace tried his hand at any thing and every thing in
the drawing line, at once earning a somewhat toughly-woven livelihood,
and perfecting his talent with the pencil. In later years, the force and
freedom of this talent were witnessed to by illustrations of a more
important character in a magnificent edition of Voltaire's _Henriade_,
published in 1825, and of the well known _Life of Napoleon_ by Laurent.

Failing, as we have said, and perhaps fortunately for him, in the
achievement of the great Prize of Rome, he turned to the line of Art for
which he felt himself naturally endowed, the incidents of the camp and
field. The "Taking of a Redoubt;" the "Dog of the Regiment;" the "Horse
of the Trumpeter;" "Halt of French Soldiers;" the "Battle of Tolosa;"
the "Barrier of Clichy, or Defense of Paris in 1814" (both of which
last, exhibited in 1817, now hang in the gallery of the Luxembourg), the
"Soldier-Laborer;" the "Soldier of Waterloo;" the "Last Cartridge;" the
"Death of Poniatowski;" the "Defense of Saragossa," and many more,
quickly followed each other, and kept up continually and increasingly
the public admiration. The critics of the painted bas-relief school
found much to say against, and little in favor of, the new talent that
seemed to look them inimically in the face, or rather did not seem to
regard them at all. But people in general, of simple enough taste in
matter of folds of drapery or classic laws of composition or antique
lines of beauty, saw before them with all the varied sentiments of
admiration, terror, or dismay, the soldier mounting the breach at the
cannon's mouth, or the general, covered with orders, cut short in the
midst of his fame. Little of the romantic, little of poetical
idealization, little of far-fetched _style_ was there on these
canvasses, but the crowd recognized the soldier as they saw him daily,
in the midst of the scenes which the bulletin of the army or the page of
the historian